


Two Weapons

by wewillalwaysenduphere



Series: The Hamilton Challenge: The Other 51 [7]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Enemies to Friends, F/M, Gen, M/M, Red Room (Marvel), Violence, rape mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2019-03-29 14:38:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13929153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wewillalwaysenduphere/pseuds/wewillalwaysenduphere
Summary: Clint saved Natasha when given the orders to kill her. This is them, getting to know each other.This is Natasha, disovering her humanity.





	Two Weapons

Clint and Natasha have never had sex.

It’s probably the only barrier that hasn’t been broken, and once you know them better, you’ll realize it’s not even actually a barrier.

When Clint decided not to kill Natasha, when he saved her life instead, that wasn’t the beginning of their friendship. That wasn’t when Natasha started trusting him. At that point she knew he was dangerous, and she knew he was committed to SHIELD, but she attributed him saving her to him wanting her as an asset, not him seeing her as a human being that had been broken down and used like a tool.

At that point in her life, she didn’t see herself as a human being to begin with. It was as if her whole life had been spent underwater – she hadn’t really felt it, hadn’t made decisions for herself, hadn’t had any responsibility except for completing the mission, no freedom except for picking the weapon she’d use for her next kill. Her body was nothing but another weapon, and she regarded it as such – with little more care than a gun.

And then there had been Clint. Clint, and later Coulson.

She had met Clint on a mission, had seen the look in his eyes, the muscles in his arms, the smoothness of his movements. She had known him to be a killer.

Outside of missions, he was a disaster. How a man that could manage to fight her and win was able to fall over his own feet would never make sense to her. How he drank straight from the coffee pot and no one even said anything didn’t make sense to her.

“Hey, they’re gonna make you see a shrink. It sucks, not gonna lie about it, but you’re too useful not to clear for duty.”

They were sitting in his room, he was doing something with his arrows – she had never used a bow, didn’t know what kind of maintenance they needed – while she was sharpening her knives. Clint was the only one she’d met so far that didn’t become twitchy when she did that in his vicinity.

“They won’t clear me as long as they assume I might turn around and kill them.”

He looked at her, long and deep, and the funny, klutzy Clint is gone, she can see the killer in his eyes again.

“But you won’t.”

She considered asking him how he could know that, how he could be sure she wasn’t just playing them all.

“They don’t like me wearing my mask.”

Clint merely shrugged.

“Everyone here has one, yours just happens to be terrifying.”

“You’re not wearing a mask, you just act like you’re stupid.”

Now he laughed. “It never hurts to have people underestimate you – but don’t tell anyone I said that.”

Natasha nodded, yes. She and Clint were very similar, but they expressed themselves in very different ways.

Over the next few months at SHIELD, she slowly discovered herself – in the way she hadn’t been able to while being nothing but a mindless assassin for Red Room.

She found out that pizza was tasty, but not a religious experience, which is how Clint made it sound. She realized she was more of a cat than a dog person, but she still loved Clint’s dog. She liked comfortable clothing, sweatpants and soft hoodies, but she couldn’t allow others to see her like that – because clothing was like armour, and she made sure to always look unapproachable when at SHIELD. 

When the shrinks cleared her for active duty – after five months of sessions and interrogations and lie detector tests – she was somehow dismayed not to have Phil Coulson as her handler.

Phil Coulson looked like nothing much, cheap suits, bleak smile, boring haircut. He was one of the sharpest men she’d ever meet, and she needed two months to figure that out. He was good.

Unfortunately for her, he was Barton’s handler, and whoever else he worked with seemed to exhaust his capacities. Which was fine. Her handler, Miller, was just as bland and boring-looking as Coulson, but only about half as competent.

The reason it was fine was that she didn’t need anyone to complete her mission, she had been working alone for years, she had skinned herself trying to get out of handcuffs, she had walked miles with a bullet in her leg, she had survived every single time. She knew she could survive this.

She did. Her missions gradually became more interesting, more demanding, more important. She was at SHIELD for about a year when they gave her clearance level five, still nowhere near Clint and Coulson, but at least she wasn’t treated like an outsider anymore.

Clint came to visit her regularly, he somehow knew when her missions were over, and if he wasn’t doing one himself, he would usually wait in her room, watch tv while she showered before having dinner with her and talking about whatever she felt like. Often, they were quiet and simply cleaned their weapons, but she got used to him. She liked having him around.

Normally – in the Red Room – company had always been something that meant danger. When she wasn’t alone in a room, she was always ready to attack. She still was, with everyone but Clint.

“They want you to have an eye on me, right?” She had asked, roughly a year after SHIELD had taken her in.

“Yup,” he’d said, not looking up from where he was polishing his bow, and they both knew a denial would have been nothing more but an insult to her intelligence.

“That’s not the whole reason I’m doing it, though,” he added, as if that was all that needed to be said, and for some reason, Natasha was inclined to believe him. For some reason, she was sure that Clint Barton genuinely cared about her.

Her life at SHIELD was similar and at the same time completely different from the Red Room. There were still missions, she was still killing, still had blood on her hands. But in her downtime, she could now do whatever she wanted. There was no rigorous training routine – she was expected to keep herself fit. She could eat what she wanted.

And the biggest difference: No ideology to follow. There was no leader to revere, no plan to take over the world, no one who minded if she spoke up every now and then. Not that she made use of that often, but she vetoed two missions and was actually listened to, and despite all the times SHIELD had extracted her, had not shot her in the back when they could, had never left her behind, those two times when she had refused a mission and they had respected was the point when she had truly accepted that things were different here.

The first time she visited Clint in his flat, he was in nothing but boxer shorts and a ratty t-shirt, watching a tv series for children. He scrambled up and into a pair of jeans that had a coffee stain on them, and stared at her indignantly.

“I never told you where I live!”

“I found out,” she stated the obvious, before looking around. His apartment was old, but it was much nicer than her SHIELD issued room on base. She wanted a flat, she realized.

“I read the book you recommended.”

“Did you like it?”

Carefully, she placed the old copy on his desk, not sure between telling the truth and a polite lie. It’s Clint, she thought, and told him the truth.

“It’s awful, but I bought some I think I’ll like. Thanks for giving me the idea.”

And she was right, she started reading after that, fiction, fantasy, but also books about psychology, about trauma, about soldier’s experiences with war, about the history of her country – the true history, not the ideology she had been fed since she was four.

They watched some more Dog Cops – the children’s series Clint was so fond of – and she stayed there for the night, sleeping on Clint’s couch, not really able to get much actual sleep because she didn’t know whether the building was safe, but all in all much calmer than she would have been a year ago, because Clint was close and she trusted him.

The next mission Clint took almost killed him. He got shot three times, was in a coma for almost a month, and Natasha realized that without him, she would feel alone – not alone in the way she had always been at Red Room, but the kind of alone you can only be after you met someone who completes you.

Because that was what Clint did – understand her, support her, complete her. Not in the childish way that people say that thing in romance movies – no. She and Clint were more than that. She declined her next mission and took care of him instead, staying at his flat, buying food, getting him to therapy, all of it.

After three months, when he was almost healthy enough to be cleared for duty again, they were lying on his bed, and he shifted, just a little, to look into her eyes. The moment stretched on, and Natasha knew he was going to kiss her. It was the first kiss she ever had that wasn’t for a mission, the first kiss that was hers to give back or to deny. It was soft, and slow, and more of a question than a demand.

Very carefully, she pushed him back. Clint didn’t hesitate, he pulled back immediately.

“I’m sorry, I just – I felt like I had to? Like there might be something.”

“I understand,” she said. There was silence, and then she opened up.

About all the men she’d slept with because she was ordered to. How she killed them after. All the terrible, gross, disgusting things she had already done, and when he moved closer this time, it was only to hold her, and that was proof of how much she trusted him – that his hands on her had never felt like their hands, that his hands had always been a source of comfort, of safety.

“I trust you, Clint. I like you. I have never trusted or liked a man I slept with. And I don’t want to…taint this.”

Clint took a deep breath and nodded. He might not have completely understood what she meant, but he understood what she wanted. It changed nothing between them.

There was still no one who knew her as well as Clint – there would never be anyone who knew her as well as Clint. They had never had sex, but she knew Clint’s body as well as her own, maybe better. Every scar, because she had stitched so many up herself.

After that one fatal mission, SHIELD decided to have them work together, and Strike Team Delta was born. Natasha didn’t trust Coulson the way she trusted Clint, but she trusted him.

And in the years to come, people would realize that they came as a set. Even Clint’s wife would realize pretty quickly that Natasha was part of him, and while she was worried about him cheating at first, she was clever to see that their relationship was something very different.

But Natasha wasn’t lying when she told people that Clint loved that if they would hurt him she’d kill them – she was serious. Deadly serious. It wasn’t Bobbie’s fault that their marriage didn’t work out though.

Later, with Bucky, Natasha could only hope it would work this time. Because Clint always fell so fast, so hard, and the only person who would never betray him was she. But she also knew that when it came to Clint, he would always put her first. Always. It now made sense to her – the way he could look like a killer and fall over his own two feet. The way he was vulnerable from his past, in the way only she knew about. And Clint knew her darkest secrets, knew her ledger was dripping red.

It was just the relationship they had. More than friends, more than lovers, more than siblings.

Two weapons that had found humanity in each other.

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I kind of kept it in a little bit of a cold, detached tone, because I feel like this is what Natasha would think like.
> 
> Kudos & Comments are appreciated :)


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